1My first acquaintance, as a graduate student at the University of Durham, with what was then the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia came in the spring and early summer of 1960. Travelling by train on the Tauern Express heading for Split on the Dalmatian coast, I alighted at Zagreb and the next day was received by Grga Novak, President of the Yugoslav Academy and a distinguished prehistorian. I had met him in the UK the previous year and explained my plans for a study of Roman Dalmatia and received the invitation to call on him in the Academy, where he presented me with letters of introduction to the museum and university specialists across the country. These proved of immense value in meeting Duje Rendić-Miočević and Marin Zaninović in Zagreb, Mate Suić in Zadar and Branimir Gabričević in Split. In Sarajevo I was welcomed by the epigraphist Dimitri Sergejevski in the Museum and by Esad Pašalić, dean of the Philosophical Faculty of the University and an authority on the road system and extensive mining activities of the Roman era in Bosnia. Without the generous support of the above my subsequent travels across the entire country, a land recovering slowly from the scars of the Second World War, would never have provided such an invaluable foundation for further study. Most journeys were made by bus, with innumerable conversations, then in basic French or German, with fellow passengers for whom an English student of remote antiquity was a curiosity. On arrival I was often advised regarding accommodation or, in the larger centres, sought a room in a private residence through the Yugoslav travel agency Putnik. Two rail journeys proved memorable, from Zagreb to Split via the dense forests of western Bosnia around the Una and Unac valleys then via the Strmica pass through the Dinara watershed to the arid coastal hinterland ending in the rich lands of the Bay of Castles that sustained ancient Salona. Even more dramatic was a long journey by narrow-gauge railway between Sarajevo and Podgorica (then Titograd), the new capital city of Montenegro. Beginning via the hills south of Sarajevo, the line reached the upper valley of the Neretva, passing along the bank of the recently created Jablanica lake to turn south through the dramatic gorge flanked by high mountain ranges into the lunar landscape of eastern Hercegovina, traversing the amazing Popovo polje and then the bleak plateau around Nikšić before descending into the valley of the Zeta that united with the Morača, flowing from the high mountains to the east, beneath the walls of the now desolate Roman city of Doclea. The visual impact of that journey proved lasting to the extent that the contrasts between the valleys and forest of the interior, the desolate and limestone karst of the hinterland screened by the fertile Mediterranean coast and islands governed my perspective of Roman Dalmatia.
- 1 De mortibus persecutorum, ed. J. L. Creed (Oxford 1984), 6, 4 (p. 12).
2After the long, bloody and costly wars of conquest under Augustus the province of Dalmatia emerges as a large triangle of territory based on the Adriatic coast between Istria and the river Drin in Northern Albania with an apex not far from modern Belgrade at the confluence of the river Sava with the Danube, a northern boundary along the southern fringes of the Sava and an eastern limit down the west side of the Morava basin of Serbia to reach to Adriatic by a line that encompassed the mountains of Montenegro and Northern Albania. Most of the Roman provinces appear to have been defined with some regard to geographical realities but in this respect Dalmatia appears to be the exception. How was it practical for a provincial administration was based at Salona under an imperial legate of consular rank, with legions and auxilia based along a military axis close to the coast, to control such a terrain when the natural approaches to the interior are via the north-flowing tributaries of the Sava (from west to east the Sana, Una, Vrbas, Bosna and Drina)? When the garrison was reduced to a few auxiliary troops before the end of the 1st century AD, the governing legates continued to be appointed from ex-consuls, when a less senior ex-praetor might have been expected. Yet this was not the only administrative anomaly during the centuries when Dalmatia lay at the heart of the Pax Romana. The second was that it largely escaped Diocletian’s passion for ‘chopping-up provinces into fragments’ (provinciae in frustra concissae), as Lactantius disdainfully wrote1. While the land mass described above was left largely intact, an area in the far south was then detached and placed in a Diocese administered from the East and was destined to survive as the western limit of the Eastern Empire into the 6th century (on which more below).
- 2 Davison – Gaffney – Marin 2006. Notably only one name appears in both lists of contributors, Anama (...)
- 3 My comments and reflections on the papers that follow were composed without access to academic lib (...)
3This new collection of seven studies is the second to advertise progress in research on the Roman Dalmatia since 1969. In 2006 there appeared fifteen contributions reporting new research and new discoveries from the years 1970-20012, while the new collection brings to the fore new names and new archaeological projects, some still in progress. All seven are focussed on the Adriatic and coastal regions of Dalmatia and for the most part engaged with archaeological and epigraphic evidence. The two exceptions being an examination of the identity and role of Heracles in the Adriatic by Maria Cecilia D’Ercole, and the first section of the contribution by K. Jelinčić, A. Bertrand and E. Botte on the eastern perspective of Republican Rome.3
- 4 IScM, III, p. 382-390, no. 72, with a full discussion. See also Avram 1991, p. 132.
4The Hero Heracles is depicted in three identities, first the founder of communities and the begetter of the inhabitants, in which inevitably the Doric component is prominent. The second and less well known is the role of the Hero in pastoral society, protecting the seasonal movement of herds and flocks signalled by the locations of his shrines. The third is the protector of those on borders and margins in a region notorious among Greeks for its dangers, a role personified through the exploits of his son Hyllus. Of special interest is a link with the myth of the Cercopes, the pair of thieves who menaced travellers and who unwisely robbed the Hero in his sleep but were soon caught and punished, whose images in amber were recovered from the princely burial at Novi Pazar. The role of Heracles as protector of borders is one interpretation of the epithet Pharangeites ("of the ravine or chasm") on a marble stele erected in the 2nd century AD by the Herakleia Association, now at Callatis on the Black Sea at the opposite corner of the Greek world. A link with the Danube frontier was suggested on the evidence of a votive inscription to Hercules Ripensis by a veteran soldier at Tropaeum Traiani but the balance of opinion prefers a link with a local cult of the Black Sea region4.
- 5 Zotović 2002; Mirković 2012.
5Anamarija Kurilić treats a major theme where much remains to be done, the Roman impact on the existing landscape of Dalmatia. In this regard the census of land, recording boundaries, categories of land, inhabitants and livestock was fundamental for the raising of taxes, principally to pay the soldiers in an era when the Roman army could be no longer expected to obtain its own rewards through aggressive warfare. The most prominent traces are the grids of centuriae devised for the assignment of lands with tax obligations to colonists and perhaps others at Iader and Salona. Other surveyed areas of land, for example on Pharos and at Ston near the mouth of the Neretva, evidently pre-date Roman colonisation but also represent a centrally ordered assignment of land. In regard to the exploitation of land, we must now look for what we can learn from the laboratories, through analyses of seeds, bones and buried soils recovered from stratified deposits. The author points to the importance of clay extraction for pottery production and associated kilns. It would also be profitable to identify any local centres for the manufacture of bricks, tiles, drainage pipes and flues, when stamps appear to record large-scale importation from the head of the Adriatic. In the matter of the Roman urbanisation in the interior of the province, one may cite valuable studies centred on the middle Drina by Radmila Zotović and Miroslava Mirković.5
- 6 I. Borzić, South Dalmatian indigenous people and the Hellenistic/Republican World; A. Bertrand, E. (...)
6Two contributions6 illustrate how much can be gained from detailed examination of a specific site in an area where hitherto our understanding of the prehistoric and Roman eras has been based only on the contents of museums. Here the two sites are the necropolis of the Kopila hill settlement in the west of the island of Korčula (Corcyra Nigra) and the remains of a Roman villa at Bunje in the east of Brač (Brattia), an island hitherto known for its stone quarries and the Elder Pliny’s terse comment (N.H. 3, 152) that the island was ‘famed for goats’ (capris laudata). The island does not figure in any pre-Roman episodes and was probably part of the colonial territory of Salona, with most of the settlements, along with the stone quarries, located on or near the sheltered north coast facing the mainland. Both projects are work in progress and have, like so much else, have been disrupted by the recent ‘crise sanitaire’. In the case of Kopila the appearance of an ordered necropolis in the 4th century BC alongside a hill settlement that had existed from the 6th may be linked with Syracusan influence and the impact of external contacts with the Hellenistic world and that indeed such development occurred in other settlements on the island. In the 1st century BC the Greek communities were said to have been aligned with the native Delmatae in supporting the Pompeian fleet during the Roman civil wars and opposing the Italian settlers favoured by the Caesarians. In 34-33 BC Caesar’s heir Octavian, destroyed the settlements and enslaved the population of Corcyra and the smaller island Melite (Mljet) on the pretext of piracy and the failure to pay tribute, laying a fertile and attractive island open to settlement and exploitation. As the author concludes ‘The archaeological evidence from the necropolis and the residential part of the settlement, not only from this but from some other hillforts on the island, supports the thesis of depopulation of the island’. Alas such actions were all too often inflicted on communities that had long enjoyed a measure of independence. No such catastrophe is known to have taken place on Brattia, where the villa at Bunje, perhaps a property of Italian settlers, had by the 2nd century developed a familiar character, in which the residence was distinct from the elements of a working farm, that flourished until the 3rd century. In the 4th century the appearance of larger presses in an area of the working farm (pars rustica), along with coins of the middle of that century, may indicate a production centre of olive oil, indicated by the presence of seeds, belonging to a larger estate common in the later Roman era.
- 7 Claustra Alpium Iuliarum I. Fontes (Ljubljana 1971); Tabula Imperii Romani K34 Naissus-Dyrrachion- (...)
7For the rest of what I hope reflects my appreciation of the contents of this volume, generously linked throughout with a publication of half a century ago, I would like to offer more detailed comment on three contributions that present new epigraphic evidence or examine topics for which epigraphy is a significant component. First, let us consider the formal institution of Dalmatia as a Roman province in the last years of Augustus, treated with characteristic attention to the evidence by Marjeta Šašel Kos, but here I preface a personal remininscence. In 1962 and on several occasions thereafter I enjoyed the hospitality of Jaroslav and Anna Šašel in Ljubljana, along with their young family that included their daughter Marjeta. Jaro was a superb elucidator and interpreter of Latin inscriptions demonstrated in many studies of history and onomastics. He undertook a number of projects by way of official duty, notably the sources, literary and archaeological, for the system of barriers and military posts that formed the late Roman defensive system of northeast Italy (with Peter Petru), along with an invaluable fascicule of the Tabula Imperii Romani covering a large area of the western and central Balkans, while the range and quality of his own scholarship can be found in the collection of his papers (92 items out of a total of 160) edited by his son-in-law Peter Kos four years after Jaro’s death in 1988. For the wider world of epigraphic studies, the three volumes of Inscriptiones Latinae in Iugoslavia repertae compiled along with Anna, republishing texts recorded after the last fascicule of CIL III in 1902 and up to the year 1970, many in minor local publications, remain today of inestimable value.7
- 8 CIL III, 1741 = ILS, 938.
- 9 On the rarity but presence of the early form Hillyricum, see Kovács 2008, p. 240 citing CIL III, 1 (...)
- 10 CIL III, 2808 Scardona. For his career and death PIR2 I, 223.
- 11 CIL V, 3346 = ILS, 2673.
- 12 Nearly a century ago the problems of the lists in Pliny were considered by von Premerstein 1924 an (...)
8The key item of evidence for provincia Dalmatia’s origin remains what is now the fragment of an honorific text that was found intact along with the fragments of a statue in the Roman city of Epidaurum (Cavtat, a few miles south of Dubrovnik), and copied in the 16th century: ‘P. Cornelio / Dolabellae, co(n)s(uli), / VIIviro epuloni / sodali Titiensi, / leg(ato) pro pr(aetore) Divi Augusti / et Ti(beri) Caesaris Augusti / civitates superioris / provinciae Hillyrici (!)’8. When Mommsen saw the stone most of the text (here underlined) was lost, while suspicion was attached to the MS copy, until a separate source was identified by the late Ivo Bojanovski (cited here in the author’s bibliography), while the form Hillyricum has now been matched in an official document which came to light in the last century9. Given now the almost certain authenticity of the MS version of the Epidaurum text (though it may be significant that Illyricum Superius is not designated provincia), it is perhaps worth making a comparison with a monumental text that survives intact today, the dedication to Nero, elder son of Germanicus, by the Civitates Liburniae. Born c. AD 6, after the death of his father, Tiberius requested in AD 21 his accession to the senate through the qualifying quaestorship five years ahead of time, by-passing the usual preliminary offices. Along with betrothal to the daughter of his own son and heir Drusus, whose funerary eulogy he delivered in AD 23, these signified a high destiny until Nero was forced to commit suicide through the schemes of Sejanus c. AD 30/31.10 The votive by the Liburnian communities is undated but must belong to the years when the young prince was in high favour, while there is no reference to a legate. That Liburnia and Iapydia was a separate command during the final stages of the AD 6-9 war as indicated by the fragment of an epitaph now in Verona may also suggest an administrative separation, as well as a part of the defence of northeast Italy in a time of crisis.11 The last item of evidence suggesting that until the last years of Augustus at least some of the communities of Liburnia were not counted part of Illyricum is furnished by the Historia Naturalis of the Elder Pliny compiled in the years before AD 79. In his register of the Tenth Regio of Italia there are listed several of the communities of southern Liburnia (HN, 3, 130), while some of the same communities are also included in a list of those in the judicial division of the province of Dalmatia centred on Scardona, a Flavian municipium (HN, 3, 140). The latter list is preceded (HN, 3, 139) by the names of some communities in the province that enjoyed the exceptional status of Italian status (ius Italicum) or exemption from provincial tribute (immunitas): Flanona, Lopsica, Nedinum and Varvaria with the former and with the latter Asseria and the island communities of Fertinium and Curicta. It can reasonably be inferred that the privileged communities may have been granted these exceptional and rare advantages as a compensation for being subsequently included in a province where otherwise provincial tribute would have been imposed. Some support for this explanation can be sought in the actions of Augustus following the victory over Antony and Cleopatra in 31 BC at Actium. According to Cassius Dio (51, 4, 6), to satisfy the demands of his own veterans, Antonian settlers and those communities that had given support were uprooted from Italy and allowed to settle in Macedonia, at Dyrrachium, Philippi and other places. This ruthless action was then mitigated by grants of ius Italicum to several cities in the that province, listed by the 3rd-century jurist Paulus (Dig., 50 15, 8, 8), where veteran colonists are known to have been settled, Dyrrachium, Philippi, Cassandreia, Dium and Stobi, all titled coloniae civium Romanorum, except the last named which is recorded as a municipium. To a greater or lesser degree, the early prominence of Latin in inscriptions from these places gradually diminished as their Greek traditions were reasserted. Thus, there emerges the possibility that until the aftermath of the rebellion of the Pannonian Illyrians, Liburnia was not juridically part of Illyricum while its subsequent inclusion appears may be reflected in the imposition of a provincial census that created the forma Dolabelliana, giving rise to the many recorded regulations of local boundaries made on behalf of the Dalmatian governors during the Julio-Claudian era.12
- 13 Alföldy 1967.
- 14 Bownan – Thomas 1991; Syme 1959.
9The long and detailed update by I. Radman-Livaja of the Roman Army in Dalmatia opens with the cheering observation (for this writer at least): ‘Roman army studies have advanced significantly in the last 50 years, and it is thus even more astounding that most of Wilkes’s conclusions are still sound and pertinent’. The abundance of epigraphic evidence for the legions in Illyricum and later Dalmatia, especially after AD 9, can offer many challenges in bringing to order such an embarassment of riches, including the remains of legionary castra at Tilurium and Burnum, not to mention the several auxiliary castella on the military axis between Burnum and Bigeste near Narona. But the gaps remain, above all the persisting lack of evidence for any military presence in the vast interior, even when many local communities were beginning to engage with the epigraphic habit. Further afield, diligent Austrian colleagues seek the early traces of the legionary castra of the pre-Claudian era known to have existed at or near Carnuntum. In the central Balkans the Augustan presence of V Macedonica now appears to be confirmed by excavation at Oescus but the whereabouts of IV Scythica are yet to be sought with possible locations at Scupi or Ratiaria, both later veteran colonies that tended to be placed in vacated castra, or even at the Balkan crossroads of Naissus. The proliferation of bricks and tiles stamped by legions and auxiliary units have more than once imported confusion when they have served to chart military movements. We must perhaps admit that in times of major conflict, when entire legions disappear from the register, the picture becomes so confused, even when epigraphy appears to assist. This seems to apply in particular to the concentrations of forces for the Danube and Parthian campaigns of Domitian and Trajan. At the same time, I can still recall the excitement of locating stamped tiles of Legio VII with the hitherto unrecorded honorific titles C(laudia) p(ia) f(idelis) in the Franciscan collection at Sinj, thus confirming its presence in the province for some years after AD 42, then suspected but not proven, news that I was able to communicate to Géza Alföldy for his published study of military stamps in Dalmatia in time for the addition of a postscript.13 The discovery of wooden tablets bearing ink writing made in the pre-Hadrianic levels at Vindolanda in northern Britain include a register indicating that most of the military manpower was dispersed across the region on a variety of tasks, rather than being mostly confined to their winter quarters. A few years later a similar state of affairs is revealed in the papyrus record of a roster (pridianum) listing the activities of the personnel of the cohort stationed at Stobi in Macedonia. In September AD 105 they were engaged in a variety of tasks in the province of Moesia Inferior and beyond, in the year of Trajan’s second invasion of Dacia. These along with other less explicit items must surely at least blur some of the neater depictions of military deployment in the pre-Hadrianic era.14
- 15 For two Greek texts at Novae, Kolendo – Bozilova 1997, nos. 177 and 178. For what is recorded of t (...)
- 16 L’Année épigraphique for 2014 (2017, 1031a). In the matter of the texts 1031b (Greek) and 1013c (L (...)
10Few advances in Roman provincial studies can be more satisfying when close attention to a hitherto neglected area produces a discovery of more than parochial significance. Recent programmes of study in the region of Albania north of the river Drin, reported by Saimir Shpuza and Etleva Nalbani, have brought to light some details of local significance, including the location of a settlement at Bushati, a likely location for the historic Bassania on the road between Scodra and Lissos. Also of great value for topographical studies is the discovery of a section of the Roman highway that appears to confirm the locations of the Roman road stations Bersumnio and Cinna with Vuksanlekaj and Kalldrun respectively. The outstanding find must be the statue base extracted from the structure of a cistern dating from the Venetian era bearing a Latin honorific text for Julius Memmius, erected by the ordo of the splendidissma colonia of the Scodrani for their patron. Not least of value is confirmation of the status of the city in the Roman era, hitherto known only from a municipal career from the nearby Flavian municipium Doclea. Some details of the text pose questions but more significant is the dating to the end of the 3rd or early 4th century. If this is correct, it places the text in the period when the region had been detached from Dalmatia to form the Roman province of Praevalitana/Praevalis, controlled from the east by being grouped in the Diocese of Moesia or Macedonia. In a schedule of provinces, the Synecdema of Hierocles of the 5th/6th century, the province Praevalitana is the most westerly territory of the Eastern Empire, of which Scodra was the capital by virtue of being listed before two other cities in the province, Doclea and Lissos. In a career that began with military service Iulius Memmius rose through a series of administrative posts to high equestrian rank, while his final post was primipilaris (not to be confused with the legionary chief centurion primus pilus). In the Balkans this post is recorded in the first half of the 4th century on texts at castra on the lower Danube, Oescus and Novae, naming wealthy individuals who had organised the delivery of supplies to the soldiers.15 This function is a possibility that must be entertained for the primipilaris at Scodra, unless of course, it records a hitherto unrecorded role in the senior ranks of the late Roman administration. For this I would suggest that he was not a native of the city, already suggested by the honour of patronus, and that he was responsible for undertaking a service or benefit for which the citizens of the provincial capital were grateful to the extent of erecting a statue with the honorific text.16
11I hope the above remarks reflect an enthusiastic gratitude to the contributors of this collection of papers, and, from both Susan and myself, to the organisers of a most agreeable stay in the heart of Rome that included a memorable visit to the Palazzo Farnese.